


Zombie Heart

by deliadeetz



Category: The Walking Dead & Related Fandoms
Genre: Cats, Comedy, Dark Comedy, Multi, Romantic Comedy, Zombie Apocalypse, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-05
Updated: 2019-11-05
Packaged: 2021-01-23 19:29:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21325453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deliadeetz/pseuds/deliadeetz
Summary: Kira Perkins was just a normal slacker college dropout -- until she had to fight for the lives of her friends, and her cat.
Comments: 6





	Zombie Heart

If you’re still here, you remember it. The first time that you ever heard about it, and the first time that you saw it. It’s like remembering where you were when Kennedy was shot, when the Challenger blew up, when the Twin Towers fell. Those events seem so small in comparison to the event that will most likely end the human race. And to think, we all thought that nuclear war or terrorism would end the planet.

  
The first time that I saw one, I was still working at the laundry on 5th and University. Not the most pleasant of neighborhoods, with the hobo camp that assembled across the street around 5 every night, but still, when you’re young and uneducated, a job is a job, and at the time, I thought that I would eventually become…something. Go back to school, get a degree, get a job, get married, have kids. Die old.

  
Those options were mostly taken away on December 4, 2004, with the first sighting reported in Hong Kong.

  
None of us in the US really took it seriously. Strange things had been going on for years, and like typical Americans, we thought that, really, nothing would hurt us. That the government would take care of it and protect us.

  
When a random hobo ambled into the laundry, hands extended towards me, I was bent over an industrial machine, cleaning the slime residue from the soap trap. The flood of faux-soap smell dulled my senses, blocking the stench that now makes me more alert than a triple espresso chocolate extra sugar whipped creamed mocha.

  
No, it wasn’t the smell, nor was it the noise of his slowly ambling, sloshing footsteps. Hell, I didn’t even hear the moans from his throat. Frankly, in that neighborhood, back then, it was commonplace to hear shrieks and moans from the random Turret’s sufferers.

  
Looking back, it’s amazing that I lived.

  
I felt the coldness of the hand as it dug the air towards my throat, that otherness of someone approaching you. For a moment, I thought that it must be the wind, that the damned front door had gotten stuck open again. Great. Another thing for me to fix in this dump.

  
It was the chill that made me whip my head, look around towards the stupid door and realize that it was a person grasping hungrily towards me.

  
Now, I’ve had to fend people off before. You’d never believe the nutballs that come into a Laundromat. Actually, if you’ve spent any time in a laundromat (and I suspect that everyone has at least had a broken machine once or twice in their lives, you probably have spent some time in a Laundromat), and are familiar with those that watch with elation as their underwear rolls around with the towels in the dryer, spinning and twirling until the cloth is hot and crispy, perhaps you are familiar with the more…controversial clientele of a city laundry.

  
I long for those days. The world made sense. There were movies playing at the theater, stores were open for business rather than open for looting, and all of my friends and family were alive. My biggest problems were that I had dropped out of college and that I was breaking up with my boyfriend.

  
After Eric was murdered and eaten by zombies, the bright side was that I no longer had to worry about a break-up speech.

  
The zombies seemed to flood through the upper Pacific Coast and filter down. People in SoCal were unprepared, not listening to the news and worrying more about their nosejobs and suntans rather than a massive pack of flesh-eating mounds of former humans coming to get them. The zombies descended slowly, with the elderly population becoming affected first. Then there were zombie kids, zombie teenagers, zombie parents, zombie teachers, zombie doctors, and well, you get the idea.

  
If you are reading this, well, we’re of a dying breed, to use some cowboy talk. It seemed that the best thing to do was to stock up on eggs, bread, and milk and hole up somewhere with a staircase. Oh, and toilet paper. Let no French toast emergency be brought on without it. Hallelujah, amen.

  
But back to my story of “how it all started for Kira Perkins.” Oh yes, the reaching for me. The cold hands. The brittle sound of the moaning. The shiver down my throat from an unknown fear. I looked around me and saw…the biggest fucking diamond ring that I’d ever seen!

  
Never mind that the skin around the diamond was a little gray and kind of falling off the bone, much like a chicken leg with a bit of meat still clinging on to the browned, slimy bones. This ring was epic! And I’m not much of a jewelry person, but son of a! It wasn’t until the ring scraped my left cheek that I noticed that someone was getting a bit too personal. I pushed off, and the fear shot through me as I took in the monster leering at me.

  
It was the first time that I had ever seen a zombie. She paused, eyeing me up.

  
It was plain to tell that at some point, she had been beautiful. Her hair was falling out of what looked like a school-teacher bun from the 1800s, now with a long, silver hair pin sticking crazily out of the top of her cracked skull. Her ruffed top draped embarrassing low on her tattered shoulders, the bones poking through one of the grayed elbows. Her white hair hung in scraggles around her withered gray face, an eyeball socket staring mournfully empty as it appraised me.

  
A scream escaped my throat as the sun poured in, glinting off of a familiar gigantic, gaudy, golden cameo locket that hung between her shriveled breasts.

  
Fu-ck-ing Ke-ryst. It was Mrs. Middleton, my third grade teacher. She had hated me when I was 8 years old, throwing chalkboard erasers at me when I answered a question wrong, taking any cheap shot that she could over the fact that I had dyslexia and read slower than the rest of the class. In fact, it was probably the beginning of my current problems with underachiever (ie, working in a Laundromat wasn’t exactly a “career” choice).

  
And from the snarls coming from her throat, it appeared that her feelings towards me had not changed.

  
For a full second, her hollowed eye surveyed me hungrily. Then she lunged with more strength than a Great White shark.

  
Her gnarled fingers dug for my hair, her face lunged towards me. Augh. Her breath was worse than it had been when I was 8-years-old. And that woman loved Chinese food.

  
Her teeth were chipped, stained from a lifetime of smoking. And they were coming straight towards me…this was a little too personal. Goddamn, her breath smelled. Bad. In fact, she smelled altogether bad. Like someone threw up in a dirty diaper then put it on a dead skunk bad. Gee-zus.

  
I couldn’t take it, and this was too close for comfort. As she pushed in closer, my impulse was to push her away. She had bullied me and harassed me through the third grade, knowing full well how fucked up my home life had been. She had publicly made fun of my learning disability, giving me a complex throughout the rest of my time in public school. In a way, I blamed her for my failure at higher education.

  
So I didn’t feel sorrow for her current state of grossness, nor did I feel much remorse for pushing her away from me, forcefully. In fact, you might say that it felt sort of good, pushing the old bat away from me.

  
I did, however, feel some remorse when she lunged at me even harder, her teeth bared to bite, and I shoved her back even harder, my hands pushing at her skull. She just kept coming back, growling, mad. I screamed for help, told her to stay away from me, all of the things that I did to chase away normal vagrants. It wasn’t the first time that someone had tried to roll this place, and I was no stranger to fighting aggression with aggression.

  
But, I knew this woman. She might have been a bully and poor excuse for a teacher, but she was not just some random robber or crook. So I did what anyone would do.  
Swat her away like a bee, fighting back only because she was relentless in her aggression.

  
“Mrs. Middleton, it’s me. Kira Perkins. Remember me? The dummy?” She didn’t seem to understand me, responding only with grunts and more swipes at my face. She was surprisingly strong for a septuagenarian.

  
She lunged again, her teeth almost clamping onto my shoulder. All bets were off. This old bitty wanted to bite me, I needed to defend myself. I used the only weapon that I could find – the wire hangers (!) that were laying beside the cash register. Joan Crawford would be so happy to see me using them for something besides hanging clothes.

  
Sheesh, the old witch looked even worse than she had when I was in school, and she must have been pushing 150 back then. Her clothes were in rags, her hair a hornet’s nest of a beehive that had been slept on and never re-teased for months, and – Dear God – her skin had several lacerations and open wounds. What the hell had happened to her?

  
She was obviously out of her right mind, and desperate to hurt me. She almost seemed…hungry. She was making a mess of the place. A mess that I would have to clean up after I finally got her out of here. Knocking over piles of fluff n’ folds, stinking up the dry cleaning with her horrible body odor.

  
She needed to leave. I was done with this crap. She let go another guttural wail, and I began to channel Marion Ravenwood, telling her that nobody tells me what to do in my place (well, it wasn’t mine, but I was in charge here!). I turned and began swatting at her with the hanger more fiercely, but she continued to advance.

  
She moaned again, guttural and ancient, and from somewhere, she became amazingly fast, her strong little fists grabbing onto my head, her mouth open…I had no choice, now that I think about it. I was acting on pure adrenaline. I forgot about the piece from the dryer in my hand…and as I raised my hands to push her head away, the piece wound up sticking out of her skull.  
Mrs. Middleton fell to the floor, limp and still. What had I done? I bent down to check on her. Oh shit, oh shit. She wasn’t moving. Her body was absolutely still and stiff with rigor mortis.  
Fuck. Shit. Damn. ##!$%#@!!! She was dead, fucking dead. And I had killed her. And I had motive, I guess. And…shit. I was a murderer. I might have hated her, and yes, maybe I once maybe wished for something bad to happen to her, but dead? No way.

  
So what should I do? Call my mom? It was only 4 pm, maybe she wasn’t drunk yet. Call my dad? No phone number. Try to run away? I couldn’t do that. I ran to the maroon rotary phone on the wall, and patiently twisted the dial, waiting for the clicks that would connect me to sanity. After 6 rings, I hung up, hearing the police siren growing nearer. Holy fuck. How could they already know?

  
I grabbed onto the front doorway, my hands and arms stretched across, the remainder of my body leaning towards the street. The cruiser sped right past, blue and red lights whirling. Then two more went by, doing top speed. In fact, there seemed to be a lot of chaos on the streets.

  
This was how it all started. With me killing one, and not even realizing it.

I sat there for a few minutes, stunned, wondering what to do. Call the cops? Call an ambulance? What do you do when you murder someone, even if it was in self-defense and the person looked like they were going to drop over any minute? And that she was a self-righteous hag that bullied young, impressionable kids? Nah, the cops probably wouldn’t care about that.

  
But I had to do something. Sooner or later, someone was going to walk into that door, and I know that I probably wouldn’t want a dead bitch on the floor when I discussed how to get the cum stains out of my sheets (yes, I’ve had this conversation with patrons).

  
Would I go to the electric chair for murder? Even though she was attacking me? Even though she was clearly going to kill me if I hadn’t killed her first?

  
Shit. Jail would be…no fun. Those women are tough, and mean. And I’ve heard stories….

  
Who could I call? My parents? They wouldn’t care. Eric? I was planning on breaking up with him. Dumping this on him would bind us, forever. No, I needed to call Tom. Tom was my best friend and roommate. Tom would know what to do. Or at least bring me some lunch. I needed to eat. I’m hypoglycemic, and I get freaky if I don’t eat regularly. I can’t think on an empty stomach.

  
“Hello?” Tom’s voice sounded half asleep.

  
“Dude, it’s one in the afternoon? Are you still in bed?”

  
“I worked late. Whatdya want?” He growled.

  
“Um…can you um, come down here? Like, um, bring me some food? I can’t leave.” I said. Boy, that was an understatement.

  
“Grrrrrrr….I’m tired Alex. Can’t you just hang the ‘Back in 15 minutes” sign on the door and grab something?”

  
“Not today…something’s…well, I just can’t. Can you just…come down here?” I thought of telling my best friend about what I’d done, then an attack of paranoia told me not to tell him on the phone.

  
“Fine. I’ll come down. You wanna sandwich?”

  
“Yes,” I said, trying to sound normal. “Almond butter on toast.”

  
“Right, right. I’ll be there in…half an hour.”

  
He couldn’t be here sooner?

  
“You can’t come sooner?”

  
He laughed raunchily. “Never had anyone ask me to do that.”

  
“Ha ha. I just…there’s a situation. I need your help.” I could hear the desperation in my voice, which he must have picked up, because he then said:  
“Sure, be there soon.”

  
I decided that I needed to cover her up. Couldn’t just let a dead body hang out in the joint like a regular customer. And maybe I should move her out of the center of the floor, at least until Tom got there. Yes, that would work. But I’d have to touch her. A sheet! Yes, a sheet of plastic, even better! It would surely shield me from her stench.

  
I remembered there being some clear plastic sheets in the storage closet – some sort of storm window material. I’d wrap her in the sheets, then put her into the closet.

  
I approached her body, mentally steeling myself for the shock of feeling her stiff skin. I expected it to feel as cold and hard as the fur on the dead dog that I found in my parents’ front yard when I was 17 – unsettlingly stiff, enough to make me jerk back. I knew somehow that the dog was dead, not sleeping, but I had to check. I remembered how I had pulled back my hand, as though the dead dog would attack me, or spread to me the disease that had killed it.

  
Remembering the dog, I vowed that I would not touch Mrs. Middleton’s dead skin. I began to place the plastic over her face, the stern look that had been present since third grade was still on her face. I would have to lift her up, haul her to the closet. My hand brushed the fetid cloth of her tattered dress.

  
I gagged. This wasn’t me. I was not the type of person that killed someone, let alone hid them and tried to dump the body in cold blood. No, I would just call the police. Maybe they would believe me that a decrepit old lady was threatening my life. I might as well take up smoking now. Or collect cigarettes. Aren’t they like money in prison? That’s what the movies tell me anyway.

  
I gathered the plastic and deposited it in the trash. No need incriminating myself further. I had dropped the phone in the scuffle, but I needed to find it quickly and call the police before someone noticed…

  
Too late. I had locked the front door, but evidently someone needed something cleaned badly enough to beat on the glass doors. Horrified, I saw that it was only Tom in my pink bath robe, his face desperate.

  
“Let me in!!!!” He screamed as I fumbled with the lock.

  
He slipped in through the door, grabbing it from me and slamming it shut and locking it with one swift movement. Tom is a dancer and much more graceful than I will ever be.  
His face was flushed and agitated. “There’s….something’s happening out there.”

  
“What?” I queried. Had news of my act already spread? Was there a circle of police cars around the Laundromat at this very minute?

  
“There’s….there’s some sort of…I don’t know. There were these bums…they were chasing me. And growling. At first I just tried to ignore it, but then…they got too close, and…I just got here as fast as I could.” He looked towards the door, which now seemed to have a crowd around it…of well, people who looked worse than Mrs. Middleton had. Some were missing body parts, their faces were bloodied, and they were just…a mess.

  
“Fuck. They must have followed me.”

With the pressure building on that glass door, it wasn’t going to take long for those goons to break it down. Why did they chase Tom?  
“We need to find something to bar that door.” He started looking around for objects, his eyes still frantic.

  
I heard the crash of glass, and I didn’t need to turn around to see that the mob had broken through the glass door. I whipped my head around, and saw a mangled hand frantically grabbing towards us.

  
“Help me move this washer Kira!” Tom was unplugging one of the 3-loaders.

  
“We can’t move that thing. It’s like…mounted or something. Here, I’m just going to…” I walked to the door with a broom, batting away the hand that was hanging through the door. “Now look here. I’m calling the cops. You guys, you just need to get out of here. Find someone else to annoy.” I was hollering now. Yes, I just said “holler.”

  
“That’s not going to do any good!” Tom screamed. “Look, help me with this!” He was slowly nudging the huge washing machine. Like, really moving it.

  
Another piece of the door was broken away, with another hungry hand reaching through. Yep, those creeps were coming through no matter what. And I needed to help Tom barricade the door until we could call the police.

  
Gagging the entire time, I pushed Mrs. Middleton’s corpse out of the way, and placed myself behind the other side of the huge washing machine.

  
“1-2-3! Push!!!” Beads of perspiration were trickling down Tom’s face and arms now. I felt my gut twisting, and I knew that I would pay for this physically. After 10 minutes of budging and pushing, we had the washer against the door.

  
Tom leaned against it, wiping his face with his sleeves. It was only then that I noticed his attire, a pink bathrobe that had unfortunately fallen open.

  
“Why are you wearing my robe?” I panted.

  
“Dude! I ran out the door. You sounded so desperate.” Tom pulled the flaps together embarrassedly. After tying the terry belt, he stood with his hands on his hips, trying to recapture some dignity. “Oh,” he said, reaching into one of the pockets. “Here’s your sandwich.”

  
The sandwich. Of course. The reason why I had told Tom that I needed him to come down. I took it from his hands, enjoying for a moment the normalness of almond butter between to squished pieces of toast.

  
I must have been pre-menstrual or something, because the sight of that pathetic sandwich had tears stinging my eyes. He had to have known that I didn’t really need the sandwich, but he brought it to allow me the pretense of needing food delivered. That’s the kind of buddy Tom was.

  
“Soo….I’m guessing that the real thing that you needed was help with the corpse? Am I right, or were you tending to that and just falling behind?” Tom’s voice saved me from bursting into tears.

  
“That would be it. I didn’t know what else to do…Do you recognize her?”

  
He squinted at her pinched face. “Holy crikeys! Isn’t that Mrs…Mrs…”

  
“Middleton,” I finished for him.

  
“Mrs. Middleton! Yes! Boy, she was a witch! What? She just died in the middle of her rinse cycle or something?”

  
“Not exactly. Tom, I killed her.”

  
“You what?”

  
“She was coming after me…and she wouldn’t leave…she just kept trying to…bite me.”

  
A loud thud alerted us to the persistence of the mob outside. “Much like those guys out there.”

  
Tom glanced at the slowly inching commercial-grade barricading the doorway. “We need to get out of here.”

  
“I know…” I put my head down. “I shouldn’t have involved you in this…it’s my problem.” I sighed, the tears starting to spill down my cheeks. I slumped down into the floor. Great, this was certainly the time to fall apart. “I’ll call the police. Tell them everything. That you had nothing to do with this.”

  
Another thud. That mob meant business. Looked like we would need the police to break up that mob before they could investigate my problem with Mrs. M. I pulled myself up, feeling my insides shaking at what I was about to do. Maybe the police would believe me, but I had to at least be guilty of foul play or something, right? Was it kosher to keep a dead body in a Laundromat? That had to at least be a health code violation, right?

  
Yes, it was time to put on my big girl panties and call the police. I punched in the familiar three digits – they knew me, from the various disruptions that I had called in from working at a downtown laundry – and waited for the familiar operator’s voice (her name was Dori, in case you’re wondering).

  
I heard the ringtone, waited, and…waited. I hung up and tried again. Maybe I had misdialed? After about 20 rings, I heard Dori’s frantic voice.  
“911. What’s your emergency?”

  
“Hi Dori, it’s Kira down at Fancy Suds. We have, well, we have a couple of problems down here.” I wasn’t sure how to tell her that we had a dead woman and that I had killed her.  
“Is it those goons that everybody is calling about?” Dori’s voice was serious.

  
“Everyone? Are they….mobs?”

  
“Yep, something’s going down. Turn on your TV and watch the news. I gotta go…” She hung up.

  
Wow. The perfect escape story. Geez, I tried to call the police as soon as it happened, but I was told that they had better things to do…. But Forensics would probably blow that out of the water. I watched too much CSI.

  
Tom was a step ahead of me, frantically adjusting the antenna on the beaten up [scene here where Tom is trying to get on the internet…because of course he brought his iphone…Kira must keep him from checking his email first…but internet is down, or something] tube chained to the newspaper shelf. “What channel is Fox Local?” He muttered.

  
“69,” I said without thinking. “She said to watch the news?”

  
“Yeah, I think that she’s right. Something kooky is going on, and that washer isn’t going to hold much longer.” Another thud reminded us of the gathering mob outside.

  
“Should we brace the door with something else?”

  
The TV buzzed to life, and flashes of several mobs, much like the one jamming down our door outside were wreaking havoc all over the city. Torn, gray flesh, just like the dudes outside, moaning and grunting. Attacking people without reason, like they were possessed.

  
The city itself was torn to pieces. Was this some kind of prank? How could this have happened in such a short time? Or was I so out of it when I left this morning that I hadn’t noticed? Tom started flipping the channels, but each one had basically the same coverage. People were being attacked in much the same way that Mrs. Middleton had attacked me.

  
I looked down at her rotting carcass. I couldn’t think with that stench still in the air. I grabbed one of the bulk containers of fabric softener and dumped it onto the floor. Yeah, the faux-flower smell is obnoxious, but it’s better than zombie stench. And Tom’s body odor. Boy can work up a stink.

  
“What are you doing?” Tom glared at me. “We need to figure out how to get rid of that mob out there. Don’t you see what’s happening to people?” He gestured towards the television.  
“I just…I can’t think with the stink of this place.”

  
“Do you think that the back door is clear?”

  
“You honestly want to take our chances on the streets? Let’s just wait here until this whole thing blows over. Isn’t that what they always tell you to do in an emergency? Hunker down, wait it out?” I’ve lived through my share of earthquakes. I know what to do.

  
“You wanna tell that to our buds outside?” Tom gestured towards the ever-nudging washing machine. “If they get to us, we’ll wind up just like those poor fucks on TV. I say we try to get home.”

  
“But the police…won’t they come and…”

  
“That could take days! Do you see what’s happening? You tried calling the police, and they told you to fuck off. And I forgot to feed Bilbo before I left.”

  
Bilbo!

  
Sigh. We would definitely have to go home now. I tried not to roll my eyes. I did call Tom, after all.

  
“Sorry,” he said. “I ran out of the house so quick that I didn’t have time to feed the cat. I wonder if the zombies have broken into the complex. Or if any of our neighbors are zombies. I’ll bet that Frank Barber turned into one. Man, that guy has a stick so far up his ah---“ My stony gaze interrupted him.

  
“What?” Tom looked at me quizzically.

  
“My cat is locked up in that apartment, that’s what. And he can’t defend himself. What if those, those –“

  
“Zombies?”

  
“Those things get him?” I felt myself shaking at the thought of my beloved cat being torn apart and eaten…

  
“They won’t. Besides, it looks like they’re only chasing down people. I don’t think that they have any interest in animals.” Tom rationalized.

  
Just like the movies, the TV flashed on one of the mobs chasing and taking down a bassett hound. My heart went into my throat.

  
“Yeahhhhhh, we need to go home.” Tom said gravely.

  
Right. Now to get past that mob, get through a billion (not really) other mobs, and make it back to our apartment. The question was, how do we keep them off of us? And will we be murdering people if we hurt them in self-defense? I mean, surely the government had a handle on this disease, and was working on curing these poor fucks. Right? Right?

  
“I think that we’re going to need a weapon if we go back outside…something to keep them away from us.” He looked around the Laundromat. “What did you do to Mrs. M to…put her down?”

  
I shuddered. I didn’t want to think about that awful thing lying in the center of my workplace, rotting, stinking up the joint. That awful, terrible thing that I had done. “This.” I held up the wire hanger that I had finally brought an end to her existence.

  
Tom looked dubious, grabbing the hanger and examining it. “Don’t touch it! You’re getting fingerprints all over evidence!” I tried to grab the hanger from him.

  
“We can’t wait for the police. We have to get out of here, and figure out how we can defend ourselves…” He looked around the Laundromat again, his eyes fixing on a fire extinguisher on the back wall. “That might work.” He grabbed the red cylinder and pulled it from the wall. “Now we just have to find something for you.”

  
“I don’t think that I could –“ I began as Tom handed me the Louisville slugger that I kept behind the counter in case of extreme creepy emergencies. I’d only brandished it once at a pair of hippies that refused to leave when their load was finished (yes, they actually washed their clothes!).

  
“Remember, nobody talks back to a Louisville slugger,” he said.

  
“I’m not going to hit anyone else, Tom.” I said.

  
“Of course not. We just want to keep them away from us.” He tied the knot at the front of his bathrobe extra snug, and peeked out the window. “Any other way out of here?”

  
“Only if we go out the roof.”

  
A few minutes later, Tom was following me up the ladder that had never been removed from some construction, and I was shimmying through the tiny skylight and hoisting myself to the roof. Note to self: Do not gain weight if one expects to make narrow escapes through the roof. I knew that Tom wouldn’t make it through the slender opening. I had no choice but to knock out the skylight and continue hitting it until it was slightly wider.

  
“Tom!” His hands appeared through the top, tipping the ragged glass shards. I grabbed his arms and pulled with all of my might, despite Tom outweighing me by double.

  
“Let go Kira! You’re going to drop me.” He put his hands down, and hoisted himself onto the roof. His hands were bleeding, but he was otherwise unscathed.

  
“You’re going to need a tetanus.” I said, staring down at his bloody hands.

  
“We’ll deal with it later.” He wiped his hands on the robe. “They’re not too bad. Sorry about your robe.”

  
I sighed. It looked like between replacing my robe and the skylight that I had just broken, I wouldn’t have a paycheck on Friday. “I think there’s a fire escape or something that we can climb down.” I looked around the building, and started to take in the crowds surrounding it.

  
“I’m not sure that we want to do that just now.” Tom remarked, looking at the gray-faced goons eyeing us hungrily.

“We can’t stay here,” I said quietly. “We need to get to Bilbo.”

“I’m workin’ on it. What about that alleyway over there? It’s empty.”

  
“I don’t know…if we go down the ladder…those goons are gonna eat us alive.”

  
“What choice do we have?” Tom stuttered. “They aren’t going to lunch anytime soon.”

  
“They will be if we climb down.” I shouted.

  
“We can’t help Bilbo if we’re up here.” Tom reasoned. “Look, I’m going to distract them with the spray that I hope is still in this thing.” He gestured at the fire extinguisher in his hand. “If they back away from it, we’re going to use this and the bat to get them away from us and hightail it to my car. Sound good?”

  
I steeled myself. I didn’t have a better plan, and we’d die for certain if we stayed up here. Where the fuck were the cops? Swat team? National Guard? Didn’t they always show up when stuff like this went down?

  
“Maybe we should just…wait it out inside?” I looked down into the skylight, only to see that the zombies had broken through the washing machine, and were now desperately grabbing for the ceiling, and us.

  
Tom’s gaze followed mine. “Um, no?” He said sarcastically. “It’s this, or we possibly die waiting to be rescued.”

  
I sighed. “Let’s try it.” I looked into Tom’s brown eyes, and felt the tears. So much that we hadn’t done. Were we about to die? Probably. I’d never get to go to Comic Con, or Paris, or become a movie star. I’d never ride the teacups at Disneyland ever again, or eat crème brulee, or listen to the Ramones again. A lump swKirad into my throat of fear, remorse, regret. I studied Tom’s face, and gently kissed his cheek.

  
“Dude, it’s not like we’re gonna die. It’s gonna be fine.” Tom smiled, then started to descend the ladder.

  
Tom’s foot had barely touched the top rung when the zombies’ intensity soared. Yep, they wanted to get him to…eat him? Drink his blood? His body was shaking as he climbed, facing forwards, then pulled up the hose, facing the nozzle at the mob. He pressed the release, spraying a thick stream of liquid into their faces.

  
Amazingly, it seemed to work. As he sprayed more, the zombies backed away, repulsed by this new sensation of being hit. I scrambled down after Tom as soon as his feet hit the pavement. He continued to spray, and we managed to part the crowds enough to start making our way to his Corolla.

  
Yes, it would have been a perfect escape of us spraying and leaving in the sunset, of course, the juice ran out on the fire extinguisher.

  
Oh shit.

  
It only took seconds for the demons to recover (wow, I sounded just like Van Helsing then) and come at us with more furtive need. Suddenly, we were surrounded by clawing zombies, and they wanted us. Bad.

  
As much as I didn’t want to hit someone, some of them old people and kids, I whacked each one that was near me as hard as possible on the head with my bat. They dropped pretty easily, and with Tom on my other side doing the same with his fire extinguisher, we managed to get to his car.

  
“You locked it!” I spat as I jiggled the handle.

  
“I didn’t want anyone to break in!”

  
I batted away some goons while Tom took FOREVER to finagle with his keys and get the damn door open. He slid into the car and wiggled to the passenger’s seat. I took one last swing at a construction worker zombie, and scrambled into the driver’s seat.

  
“There’d better be gas in this thing.” I muttered as I turned the key and the engine roared to life. Tom’s car is a Corolla from the 80s, and a stick shift to boot. I futzed with the gears a few times, willing it to shift. I killed the motor, cursing the stubborn old engine. The zombies were clawing at my window, laying on the hood – any second they’d break those windows and get to us.

  
I cranked the ignition again, and stomped on the clutch and gas with all of my might. We peeled out, taking out a few priest zombies as we tore through the crowd that was trying to mob the car. “I think that there’s enough gas to get us home…We can stop at Arco if not. I’ve got my credit card.” Tom said gently.

  
“Oh yeah, Tom, let’s just hit up the Exxon self-serve, and get some chips and Cokes while we’re there!” I yKirad exasperated as I steered the car through the maze of walking goons.  
Good gravy, these things were everywhere. Nurses, teachers, elderly, babies, firemen, policemen, Caucasian, Indian, male, female, straight and gay.

  
Zombies.

  
It was good that we didn’t live far from work.

  
A number of beat-downs later, we rolled into the parking lot of our complex, the car gasping with the last few fumes of gasoline.

  
“Wow. This place doesn’t look any worse for the wear.” Tom commented. “I mean, I know that there are zombies at large now, but it doesn’t seem much different than it ever did. I always had to fight off some crackhead or something coming in and out of this place.”

  
It was oddly…deserted. With the exception of someone digging through the dumpster (no telling whether he or she was zombie or not), we were the only people around. At least that we could see.

  
I grabbed my bat, readying for anything that might sneak from behind a parked car. I looked over at Tom, his eyebrows furrowed in concentration, his hands clutching the fire extinguisher. “You ready to do this?” I asked.

  
Tom nodded. “Yeah, let’s just stay together. I have the door key ready. Keep your eye on that fuck over there.” He gestured at the dumpster diver.

  
I surveyed the area. “And keep your eyes peeled.” I pointed at Tom’s lap. “And tighten your robe. Can’t have your junk flying out when you’re trying to fend off zombies.”

  
We jumped out of the vehicle, running as fast as we could towards the common goal of our building, Tom’s fingers flying eagerly towards the keyhole.  
“How did we get here?” said Tom, looking around the untouched apartment.

  
“That was…too easy. Now where’s Bilbo? Bilbo? Are you here?” I called, looked under the couch.

  
Tom walked around the apartment, looking at the surroundings. “How is this place…how did they not get in? That crowd….”

  
“We live upstairs? Maybe they can’t climb stairs?” I found Bilbo on his heating pad, purring at the sound of our voices.

  
“Dunno,” said Tom. He started filing through our kitchen cabinets. “I’m hungry. You hungry?”

  
There was nothing to eat in the house except some ramen noodles (those things don’t go bad, right?) and some wilted spinach that I had bought the week before from the farmer’s market when we went to buy cookies. Clearly, a grocery run would be in order once this whole zombie thing was out of the way.

  
Tom made some soup of the ramen, and threw in the spinach, which wasn’t noticeably wilted once it hit the warm broth. I fed Bilbo, petted him, and we sat down to eat our lunch. Tom flipped on the TV, and all seemed right, normal, until the rerun of Three’s Company that we were watching cut off, and the channel went blank. Tom flipped around the channels, but each one was blanked.

  
“This is…not good.” Tom said, throwing down the remote.

  
“I hope that the power doesn’t go.”

  
“I wonder if the Wii still works…” Tom muttered, pulling out the nunchuck.

  
Annnnnnndddd the doorbell rang. About time the cops showed up to take us to the safe haven, or bomb shelter, or tell us to evacuate or whatever. I unlatched the lock, and carefully opened it, considering the neighborhood, and caught my breath when I saw who was knocking.

  
It was our neighbor, Hot Guy from 2-D. Holy shit.

  
My hand flew to smooth my hair immediately. I’d been crushing on HG2 for oh…6 months? Since he moved into the building, at least. I occasionally passed him in the hallways. He was classically Viking handsome – over 6 feet tall, bright blue eyes, blonde hair that I’d love to dig my hands into. I knew that he worked nights – not sure what. Tom and I raged about how hot he was, and how when we had a party, we would definitely invite HG2. Oh yeah.

  
If you haven’t figured it out yet, Tom is gay. Dyed in the wool homosexual, that boy is.

  
“Um…sorry to bother you guys…but is your water out? I can’t get a drop, and I was trying to take a shower…” Hot Guy said.

  
Tom almost knocked me out of the doorway. “You need to take a shower over here? Sure, you can use our shower! I’ll show you where it is!”

  
“Um, okay, I was hoping that the whole building was out…saves me from calling a plumber.” HG2 stuck out his hand. “I’m Alex, by the way.”

  
“Tom, so glad to finally meet you.”

  
I was not going to lose him to Tom. “And I’m Kira.” I nudged my way past Tom and his shenanigans. “We have plenty of towels and coconut shampoo.”

  
Coconut shampoo? That’s what I said to my future potential husband? Or boyfriend, or whatever? I smiled and decided to roll with it. Alex smiled back.

  
“Oh, um, I’m cool. I have stuff. Be right back.” He retreated down the hallway to get what I supposed were his wash things.

  
Tom turned to me. “Okay, we’d better goddamn have hot water, because that man is absolutely getting naked in this apartment.” I followed him into the bathroom, where he turned the nozzle on the water. “Fuck,” he said when nothing came from the tap.”

  
“You don’t think that it’s because of this whole zombie thing?”

  
Tom gave me a look. “Der. Of course it’s because of this whole thing.”

  
Fucking zombies.

  
“Hello?” We heard Alex calling.

  
We both rushed out to the front, almost clobbering Alex in his bathrobe. What was it about today and me seeing men in bathrobes. I felt a shiver when I realized that he was naked underneath the black fleece fabric. Sigh.

  
“Um, I don’t know how to tell you this, but our water is out as well.” I sighed.

  
Alex’s brow furrowed. “Dang. I needed to shower before work. Ah well. Guess I’ll just head back and finish getting ready. Hope that Starbucks has water and is open.” He sighed. “Thanks anyway, guys.” He turned to leave.

  
“I don’t think that you will need to go to work, Alex.” I blurted.

  
He turned back. “Huh?”

  
“Something’s…happened. There’s a…crisis.” I stuttered a little.

  
“A what?”

  
Tom was a little better spoken. “Look, there’s…something’s going on. There are…people are sick. I think that it might be best for you to just hole up here with us until this whole thing blows over.”

  
“Yes, we should stick together.” I chimed in.

  
Alex did the cute little confused brow furrow again, so we proceeded to explain the events of the past few hours, with my killing Mrs. Middleton, the mobs that we encountered, and how we had called the police, and figured that this whole thing would be over.

  
“I hope that the water comes back on soon,” Alex remarked after hearing our stories. “Can we see what’s up on the news?” He walked to the couch and grabbed our remote.

  
Tom and I exchanged weary glances. Clearly, we needed to give this guy the what-what and let him know the magnitude of the situation. It was real. The police weren’t coming. There was no government to protect us. No one was going to take care of this. We were on our own. And quite possibly, all that was left. There was no news. Hell, there wasn’t even running water at this point.

  
Alex was flipping through the channels in desperation. He was visibly more jilted as he kept going past channel after channel of black and white snow. “Are you guys sure? I mean, couldn’t it just be an earthquake or something?”

  
Yeah, yeah. We lived in Southern California, and there was always the ZOMG threat of an earthquake, but two things that you should know about earthquakes: 1) most of the time, you can’t even feel them, and 2) if there were to be an earthquake severe enough to knock out the water supply, you would most definitely feel it.

  
So yeah, Alex was grasping at straws with the earthquake thing.

  
Alex tossed the remote back onto the couch. “I’m gonna find out what’s going on. Besides, if the water is out, we’re gonna need it sooner or later, so I’ll hit up the store and get some water for us.”

  
“Alex, you need to stay here. I mean, you haven’t dealt with those guys. You’ll never survive by yourself.” Tom said.

  
“We should go with him, I guess.” I heard myself mumble. Tom glared at me, but I continued. “I mean, we do need water, and there’s barely any food in the house, and I need to get cat food and litter for Bilbo.”

  
“Exactly,” Alex nodded. “We’ll get some supplies, check out what’s going on, ‘cause it’s been what….4 hours since you guys were outside? We’ll see what’s going on, get what we need, and then come back here and ride out whatever’s going on.”

  
“It’ll be three of us, so we should be safe, right?” I looked at Tom for approval.

  
Tom shrugged, then looked towards the bare kitchen, knowing that we needed food. “I guess that we have to.”

If we were going out into the fray, we would need better weapons than an expired fire extinguisher and baseball bat. We looked around our apartment, and the only other weapon to be found was a golf club. Alex took one look at our weapons of choice, and told us to follow him to his apartment, as he was not going out half naked without proper weaponry.

  
Even though it was the end of the world, and even though we were basically going to get weapons to kill our friends and families should we run into them, I was thrilled at the idea of getting to see Alex’s personal space. What would it be like? Would he have tons of cool stuff on vinyl, with posters of the Ramones and nifty hipster décor? Or would he be more of a preppy type with sports banners and a big TV?

  
Alex unlocked the door to Unit 2-D, with Tom and me following him inside his personal man-cave. We were greeted by tons of beer posters, bar lights, and…gun cases. Alex was a redneck?  
Tom and I sat down on the couch while Alex went into his bedroom to change. Tom seemed just as disconcerted by the throwing stars and crossbows as me. I noted the issue of Playboy touting a full spread of a petite blonde. At least I knew that I was Alex’s type.

  
Tom glanced at the magazine and cocked an eyebrow my way. He picked it up and started leafing through the obscene pictures. “This looks like you, right?” He indicated the cover model. “I mean, kind of?”

  
Alex came back into the room, dressed in a black fleece zippy shirt, jeans, and boots. “You guys know how to use any of this?” He indicated the weapons that surrounded us.

  
Because using a throwing star is like, common knowledge? Yeah, in theory, I know that you aim it and throw it at what you want to hit, but otherwise, I’m pretty clueless with weapons. I am, however, a pretty good shot with a bow and arrow, thanks to having a redneck father. Pretty much the only thing that he ever taught me between bi-polar rampages. A crossbow was another animal. And as far as I knew, Tom had no experience with weapons, save for his prowess with the fire extinguisher this morning.

  
“Look, I’ll take the gun, since that’s the most dangerous. What do you guys think that you might be good at?” Alex slapped a belt around his waist with extra bullets.

  
I took the crossbow, thinking that my skills might translate. Tom grabbed a ninja-sword that Alex assured him was a knockoff but deadly nonetheless, and we each took some of the throwing stars.

  
Tom pointed at the shotgun in Alex’s hands. “Do you have a permit for that thing?”

  
Alex strapped the gun into a holster around his back. “Course I do. It’s part of my job.”

  
I raised my eyebrows. “And what is your job? Are you an…assassin or something?”

  
Alex grabbed some thin black gloves and sunglasses. “Actually, I am,” he said flatly.

  
Tom and I looked at each other again. Geez. We’d always talked about what the Hot Guy did for a living to work nights. Stripper? Cop? Baker? Never had assassin come up as a possible occupation.

  
“Really? No way.” Tom tried to sound casual, but I’m pretty sure that a killer in our midst was more unsettling to him than the zombies.

  
Alex nodded casually. “Okay, well, aim for the head,” said Tom as we started to the door.

  
“And stay together,” I said, grabbing Tom’s hand and squeezing it.

  
We went carefully to the hallway that connected the building, keeping our eyes open for anything unusual. We edged out of the doorway, slowly, noting that everything was as dreary and quiet as it had been when Tom and I had pulled up. In fact, the bum was still digging through the trash. What was going on?

  
“That’s mine.” Alex pointed to an old black Nissan Sentra parked 100 feet away. “Does it have gas in it?” I had to ask.

  
“Full tank.” He answered. We were all still, listening for any sounds of life (or afterlife), but there was only the sounds of our breath in the December chill. “Let’s go.” He motioned for us to follow him to the car, and of course, Tom and I ran like hell, as though we were kids trying to race. Alex was slower, taking in his surroundings as he walked, but with purpose.

  
“Should we ask him to come with us?” Tom indicated the bum digging in the dumpster.

  
“That hipster that dumpster dives? No, I hate that dude.”

  
As Alex cranked the ignition, the custom speakers (that probably cost more than the car itself) blasted reggae.

  
Reggae? Really? Fucking reggae? What kind of a hit man listens to fucking reggae? My picture-perfect dude image was crumbling rapidly. I looked into the rearview and exchanged another look with Tom. I could mentally see him shaking his head in amusement that this guy was straight. And possibly, the last straight guy on earth.

  
That was a sobering thought.

  
But I couldn’t think that way. There had to be others. This entire situation…I mean, things already seemed mostly normal around here. Sure, the drug dealers were nowhere to be found, and as we drove out of the parking lot and headed onto the roads, Alex seemed to be executing stunt driver techniques to dodge the abandoned cars…but, things had to be okay, right?

  
As we rolled into the Whole Foods parking lot, and saw the swarm of zombies draw closer to our car, almost like magnets, I realized that things were definitely not going to be okay.

  
It was the laundry parking lot all over again, with a small mob of creatures desperately trying to get at us inside the car. Alex shifted to reverse and slammed the gas, flooring a few goons, which he promptly covered with his car. Panicked, he turned the car around quickly, and started to peel out, even though there were zombies now coming at us from all sides.  
Some cool, collected hit man he was.

  
“We need to go back,” I said calmly, as we sped down 6th Avenue, the Whole Foods getting further and further away, zombies blurring in the background as they tried to chase us.

  
“We can’t go back. Did you see that place?” Alex cried, his eyes focused on maneuvering between the abandoned vehicles. “We should go back to the apartment; it seemed pretty safe there.”  
“Food.” I said softly, but firmly.

  
“Fuck,” muttered Alex, directing the car onto the parking lot freeway. “I know that there’s some stores on Hazard Road, we can go there. There’s also a Target to get anything else that we might need.”

  
Tom cleared his throat nervously, seeming to know what would come out of my mouth next.

  
“That’s not gonna work. Bilbo needs the All-Star brand of organic, wheat-free food that can only be found at Whole Foods. I’ve taken him to the vet several times over this, and he’s allergic to every other food on the market.” I said stubbornly.

  
“If we go back to that store, we will die. I promise.” Alex said calmly.

  
“If we don’t go back, my cat is going to starve to death!” Even I thought that I was a little overdramatic.

  
“To speak up, Kira and I got through a crowd like that before, and we made it through.” Tom was such a nice friend.

  
“Look, you guys. I know that you want to take care of your cat and all, but this is serious. Much more serious than I thought. I mean, we’re not even sure that there will be food in the store when we get there. These things seem very dangerous. And they seem to really want to get us, for some reason.” Alex provided exposition.

  
“They want to eat us.” I said flatly.

  
Alex seemed unfazed. “I figured. I saw some creatures like that when I was in the Navy. They were part of an experiment. Unyielding, so they made great warriors, but they have no selectivity about who they attack. And their hunger for humans, particularly their brains, is insatiable.” Wow, Alex was killing with the exposition.

  
There was stark silence in the car as Tom and I grasped what Alex had said. Basically, we knew that the creatures were relentless, and that they wanted to get us, but hearing it stated so plainly was a bit hard to digest.

  
I was interrupted from my self-pity at having my day wrecked so horribly to see that Alex was turning onto the I-5. “What the fuck? Where are you going? Disneyland?” Wasn’t that the only reason to ever get on the I-5?

  
“I need to check on my brother. He lives in UTC.”

  
I understood that. If I had any family besides Tom, I’d want to check on them. “Well, maybe you should try calling him first?” I mean, it was an awful lot of trouble to get through the freeways right now.

  
“The phones are out Kira,” Tom reminded me.

  
“Fine, but after we check on your brother, we need to get my cat.” Considering this was the sort-of man of my dreams (and possibly the last straight man on earth), I wasn’t being very charming. “I mean, I hope that he’s okay. I’m sure that he is.” I met Alex’s eyes in the rearview.

  
“He’s a tough dude,” Alex threw out. He locked his eyes on the road, concentrating on avoiding the bodies swaying towards us.

  
“Do you think that any of these might be…?” Tom trailed off.

  
“Not a chance,” said Alex flatly. “And even if they were normal, we can’t help them without being torn apart ourselves.”

  
Damn, Ahab. Where do you get off deciding that some are more important than others? Weren’t we taking an awful risk to make sure that your bro bro who is “a tough dude” is okay? What the hell? The last guy left on earth is not only a frat boy Rastafarian murderer, but also, heartless? Forget it, I was no longer interested. Gay or not, Tom could have him. There were other fish in the sea, as my mother used to say when I would come home from high school crying because some loser broke my heart.

  
Tom stretched himself between the two front bucket seats and turned on the radio (thank Jeebus, that Bob Marley shit was driving me batshit). The Shins blasted over the airwaves, followed by a used car lot commercial. He began twisting the Search dial, trying to find anything to connect us to news, reports of what was being done. Every station seemed to be on autopilot, with only reruns of War of the Roses or some outdated traffic reports as “news.”

  
But radio stations ran on autopilot a lot, right? I mean, didn’t they have them mostly on a feed when there were earthquakes, hurricanes, oil spills? No reason to panic, no reason to worry that anyone that I knew was hurt…

  
But there was reason, I realized as I saw the lumbering bodies on Miramar Road. Alex drove like a stunt driver, weaving around the walking corpses and abandoned vehicles with expert dexterity. His eyes were fixed, determined. How could he be so focused? I was spazzing.

  
Tom was playing a game on his phone. Trying to distract himself, I supposed, but I could see the furrow of his brow that he never allowed under more calm circumstances. His dermatologist forbade frowns and worries. But Tom’s thoughts were probably far away from his dermatologist.

  
“What?” Tom looked up from his phone, annoyed.

  
“Just…” I floundered. “Do you really want to waste your battery on Angry Vultures?”

  
“What do we care? The police aren’t coming, the army has better things to do, the phones are out. Why not spend the last few moments of my life doing something that brings me happiness? Hmm?” Tom cocked his eyebrows up, his eyes challenging me.

  
I turned and slumped back in my chair. There was no arguing with Tom when he was in this mood. Defensive, pouty, and just…curt. And of course, the end of the world is the time when he decides to pull this act. I fought every urge to be passive aggressive and sigh loudly. I settled for crossing my arms and looking at the corpse-ridden I-5. It was a hot day for San Diego, over 80 degrees, and the smell of decay seeped through the car windows.

  
“So…you think that your brother is okay?” This silence was driving me batshit.

  
“Max.” Alex answered, keeping his eyes on the road. “His name is Max, and yes, he’s fine. He’s a former SEAL, like me.”

  
I mentally rolled my eyes at his pomposity. Seriously, like that automatically protects you from zombies? Puh-leeze. “And what if he’s out looking for you, thinking the same thing?”

  
Alex steered the car onto the Nobel exit. “He won’t be. We have an emergency plan.” He blazed through a red light at an intersection, nearly missing a crossing woman.

  
“Dude, you almost hit that woman crossing!” I hollered.

  
Alex screeched the brakes. “Do not yell at me while I am driving! And seriously, that bitch is a zombie!”

  
“I don’t think that she is…” I noted that she was observing the rules of the sidewalk, walking pretty straight…maybe things weren’t so bad. Perhaps they were just contained to the city.

  
“You don’t think so?” Alex whipped the wheel and turned in the empty street, pulling towards the woman. “Okay, why don’t you roll down your window and ask her if she needs a ride?”

  
Okay asshole, I thought. The world seriously cannot be so bad if this chick is obeying the crossing lights. The zombies were fairly raggle taggle in their habits, only pursuing well, food. I shuddered, thinking of the monsters that we saw in Hillcrest. And by monsters, I mean the zombies, not the yuppies.

  
I pushed the button down as Alex inched the car towards the walking figure. As I got a better look at her, I noticed that it looked like she had been attacked. Her hair was matted and messy. Blood covered her left arm, and she was walking with a slight limp. Fuccckkkkk….I tried to roll up the window before the girl attacked us, but she grabbed straight for the glass.

  
“Help me, please!” The girl cried, her hands sliding down the window. Man, she was banged up.

  
Tom opened his door without hesitation. Always helping a damsel in distress, that Tom. The girl slid in beside him, her breath coming in heaves. She was pretty messed up.

  
“Are you guys…normal?” she asked hesitantly.

  
“I think so,” Tom replied. “You need stitches here.” He indicated a wide gash on her cheek.

  
“Aigh!” The girl touched her cheek, and strained to look at it in the rearview mirror. “Fuck – excuse me – do you think that it will scar?” She looked at Tom with desperation.

  
“Um…probably a little bit,” he floundered, knowing damn well that this chick was going to have a Frankenscar on her face even if we could get her stitched up by Doc Hollywood. “What happened to you?”

  
“I was attacked by this gang of … I don’t know…monsters? I know how crazy that sounds.”

  
“Not at all.” I said. “Hillcrest is swarming with them, and they’re all over the freeway. In fact, I’m more interested to know how you got away from them.”

  
“I don’t know…they just – they came at me and my boyfriend, Johnny, and … they got Johnny…” she trailed off, burying her blood-stained face in her hands.

  
Tom hugged her awkwardly, clearly not wanting to get blood on his new Banana Republic shirt (bought at regular price!). The girl sat crying for the remainder of the trip, her bloody face buried in her hands, her sobs getting louder.

  
Alex pointed the car towards the hospital, racing through the lights, until we pulled into the parking lot…where we were immediately mobbed. I had a flashback of Whole Foods, except the dread locks were replaced by flapping white coats and puke burgundy scrubs.

  
“Wrong hospital!” Alex lost his cool for a moment and jerked the car around like a stunt driver, plowing through a couple of nurse zombies.

  
Alex continued down the parkway, steering the car around the abandoned vehicles. The lights were flashing yellow at this point, and Alex sped through them. “Don’t you want to turn on Gilford?” I asked as we sped through an intersection crawling with zombies, probably the ones that had attacked the girl. “The other hospital’s on Gilford.”

  
“We’re going to my brother’s. He’ll be able to help her.” Alex said coolly.

  
“Your brother’s a doctor?”

  
“No, he’s in the military.”

  
“So he knows how to…fix her up?”

  
“Yeah, he’ll be able to help her, I think.”

  
We finally pulled up to an apartment complex so dumpy that it made our place seem like the Beverly Hills Hilton. Bleah. I should note for posterity that there seemed to be no zombies in this neighborhood. Wow, even in zombitude, people were squicked out by bad neighborhoods. I would have laughed if I weren’t so freaked out.

  
“Let’s go, sweetheart,” Tom said to the wrecked girl. He helped her out of the car, gently easing her to a standing position, but she seemed to pass out when sunlight hit her body. Tom, ever the gentleman, simply scooped her up and threw her exhausted body over his shoulder.

  
“She okay?” I looked at the limp doll over Tom’s shoulder; I couldn’t discern whether she was still breathing.

  
“She’s still alive, if that’s what you mean. It’ll be better when we can get her out of the open and to a doctor.”

  
We walked up three flights of stairs, with Tom lugging Bethany the entire way. I couldn’t help but notice that not once did Alex offer to help Tom, even though I did and was refused. Sure, Bethany was bigger than me, but I’m freakishly strong for a woman of 5’1’’. All that I could think of when we rolled up to the door and Alex started pounding on it was that I hoped to God that his brother kept a huge supply of food. Come to think of it, wouldn’t that make Alex one of the worst survivors ever to not have a huge stash of food stored away?

  
I was becoming less and less impressed by Mr. Alex and his bossy shenanigans. Particularly since it seemed that more and more, he had no idea what he was doing anymore than Tom and I did.

  
There was only one door at the end of the hallway, with a…kitten sign on it? “A Spoiled Rotten Cat Lives Here”? This couldn’t be Alex’s assassin-marine-mercenary-doctor brother? Did he have a 70-year-old roommate?

  
Alex knocked on the door loudly. “Bro! It’s me! Open up!”

  
Several locks were turned, and the door was cracked. “I couldn’t get in touch with you, Lex,” a slightly taller version of Alex said. His blue eyes raked up and down our party, taking in the injured girl draped over Tom’s shoulder.

  
“She needs help,” Tom said. “Alex said that you could help her. She’s been attacked by one of those…well, she’s been attacked.”

  
Little Alex stepped aside, and Big Alex led the way into an apartment that looked, for the most part, like Alex’s. Crappy walls, crappy redneck décor, weapons everywhere. I sighed. At the end of the world, we were surrounded by rednecks.

  
“Put her on the couch.” Little Alex said, indicating a black sofa in the middle of the room. Better than a futon like his brother, I guess? “I’m Peter, by the way.”

  
“Can you help her? She’s in pretty bad shape.” Tom said, indicating the rasping girl on Peter’s couch.

  
Bethany began choking harder. She convulsed, sitting up, then slammed back down onto the couch, still. I didn’t need to check her pulse to know that she was dead. Poor Bethany. Seeing her made me think about how lucky the rest of us had been to get away from those things.

  
Lucky. That’s all that we really were. Not smarter, or tougher, or more cunning. Lucky. That was how Tom and I had gotten through this so far. And how much longer would luck carry us through? Looking at Bethany sputtering and convulsing on the couch made me realize that time was running out for all of us, even survivor types like Peter and Alex.

  
“She’s gone,” Peter announced, even though we all knew that fact already.

  
We were all quiet for a good 5 minutes, going into our separate corners. I had never seen anyone die before today, and now I’d watched two people die, one of which I had killed. There was no waking up. More people were going to die, perhaps even me.

  
“What should we do with her? Maybe the police…?” said Tom.

  
“There are no police, Tom!” Alex shouted angrily. He stood up, and began pacing, counting off on his fingers. “There are no doctors, there are no nurses. There are no ambulances, there are no paramedics. We are it!” His face was red, and his eyes were wild with frustration and anger.

  
Nothing could whip up my protectiveness quite like someone being mean to my Tom. However, it was pretty annoying that Tom kept falling back on the services that we took for granted for so long, but were now gone. At least for now? I hoped so. Some part of me kept thinking that this was just like the time there was a noticeable earthquake, and that within a few more hours, things would go back to normal and well, boring.

  
What do you do, really, when you have a dead body in the house, and there’s no morgue to call, and you really have no idea whether the person has family to inform? What did they do back in the good old days of the Wild West when someone bought it and they had no next-of-kin, nor a mortician in town?

  
“We can’t keep her here…but I don’t like the idea of just letting those things…tear her apart.” Tom said quietly.

  
We all gathered at the windows, looking down at the complex courtyard. A few zombies were down there, seeming to be chasing….a cat. We all watched in morbid silence as the mob finally managed to grab the poor thing and rip it to shreds. My stomach lurched, thinking of poor Bilbo. Was he okay? Why had I let Alex drive us up here? Oh yeah, to check on his brother, who was fine, thank you very much. I wasn’t so sure about my cat.

  
I turned away from the carnage at the window, and slumped into an easy chair by the sofa. Yes, I was sitting beside a dead girl, but stranger things had already happened that day. I needed to get to Bilbo, to keep him safe from these creatures. To keep us safe. I could steal a car. I could just break out the window and…hot wire it? How did one do that? In all of my years of living in bad neighborhoods, I had never learned how to hot wire a car. And now, with no internet, there was no way to find out. Unless Alex knew. Or Peter. Maybe they would show me. However I got there, I needed to get back to Bilbo. I couldn’t leave him defenseless against these monsters.

  
I stood resolutely. With or without the rest of them, nay, I would insist on everyone else staying safe. I had been too lucky today, and there was an extremely good chance that I would be wishing that things had ended for me as peacefully as they had for poor Bethany. I gulped, thinking of the possibility of being torn to pieces. Ugggggggghhhh.

  
I still had the crossbow that Alex had given me. And I had fought off the zombies at the Laundromat with Tom’s help. Tom. Was it wise to leave him here with these guys that we really didn’t know? It wasn’t as though the two of them couldn’t overtake Tom and me right now, but there was a certain safety in numbers, and Tom and I stuck together. Tom had come to me when I needed him; I at least owed him the choice. Whether he came or not, I had to get my cat. Bilbo was my friend, and I had to keep him from a fate like that poor kitty downstairs.

  
I started to get up when a plump gray tabby jumped into my lap. It rubbed its body against my chest, willing for me to pet it. I could feel tears pricking my eyes as I stroked the top of the cat’s head.

  
“Hmph, that’s Mr. Meow.” I heard Peter say.

  
“Mr. Meow?” Wow, that might be the lamest name for a cat ever. Particularly for a 6’4” dude that looks like a modern day Viking. But whatever floats your boat. “He’s…cute.” The cat’s ass was directly in front of my face now. Lovely.

  
My common sense began tingling, and something told me to pay attention to the shuffling sound coming from the couch. “Is this your only pet?” I asked Peter.

  
“Yep, just me and him.”

  
The shuffling sound turned into a creaking, and I looked up to see Bethany moaning and arising slowly from the couch. Whoa. Girlfriend had gone from bad to just plain tore up in a few minutes. Her hair was more askew, and her skin had turned…gray. I guess that’s what death did to you. Besides being gray and gross, her flesh was thin and torn in places. She reminded me of…Mrs. Middleton. And boy, did she smell like Mrs. Middleton, too.

  
She turned for Peter, who was distractedly playing with the cat. “Peter!” I squeaked, grabbing for my crossbow. Peter turned swiftly, more swiftly than I had ever seen a human turn, and like lightening, Alex was at his side. Bethany growled, her mouth inching towards Peter. I fixed the arrow into the crossbow, and aimed for her head. Unfortunately, getting Bethany would have meant hitting Peter. Alex got behind her as Peter was shoving her away, and pulled her from Peter. She tried to then attack Alex, but Peter regained his footing and both pinned her face down.  
“Shoot her Kira!” I heard Alex yell. I aimed, closed my eyes, pulled the string back, then opened them and let go. The arrow landed in her skull with a sickening thud.

  
Twice in one day. Of all of the people in this room, at least one of which was a hired assassin, I was the only person that had purposely killed today. Did that make me like the toughest or something? For my sake and for Bilbo’s sake, I certainly hoped so.

  
I could feel my guts churning, needing to get out of here. Away from the body that we all stared at, away from the stench, and back to my cat. I wanted to go back to this morning, before the world fell apart, when my biggest problem was a bounced check. I wanted to have breakfast and watch TV. Looking at what was left of that poor girl, I realized that probably most of my friends and acquaintances were gone. Really gone. And if they weren’t dead, they were…worse than dead.

  
What if I had killed them in cold blood? What if there was a cure for this…issue? As if hearing my thoughts, Peter said, “You did the right thing, Kira.”

  
“She’s…she’s…you killed her!” Tom spat, suddenly loud and alert.

  
“Calm down guy. She had to. That…” Peter interjected, advancing towards Tom.

  
“She wasn’t going to get better, Tom.” Alex said quietly. “She had been bitten. I didn’t realize it until now, but the bite is the key to the infection.”

  
“And she was going to bite Peter.” I said quietly. “It was just like Mrs. Middleton, Tom. And those people outside.”

  
“They’re not people anymore.” Peter said.

  
“What’s wrong with them?” I had to ask, since they seemed to know so much.

  
“They’re infected with this…virus.” Alex said, as though we were talking about a flu shot.

  
“So…we just wait here for them to figure out how to climb the stairs, and they’ll come up and infect us too?” Tom asked furiously.

  
Peter and Alex exchanged a look. “Los Palmas,” they both said at the same time.

  
“Los Palmas. What the heck is Los Palmas?” I asked.

  
“The armory out on 82?” Tom asked.

  
“Yep. Best place to be. Away from everything, lots of stairs, and they have tons of generators.” Alex said.

  
“That sounds pretty perfect. What about food?” Tom asked.

  
“Petey has plenty of reserves.” Alex smiled for the first time, and I remembered that I thought he was hot.

  
Tom cocked an eyebrow. “Oh yeah? You got a deep freeze or something?”

  
Peter smiled as well. “Better.” He walked into the back and retrieved a couple of flat packages, which he held up proudly. “MREs.”

  
“MREs?” Tom asked, confused by the little packages in Peter’s hands.

  
“Meals Ready to Eat.” Alex answered. “It’s freeze-dried food that you just have to add water to make. And heat, of course, but we have ways to heat it without power.”

  
“Yuck. But if that’s all that we have…” I said.

  
“It is.” Alex answered. “You wanna risk a grocery store again?”

  
As a matter of fact, I did. Odds were that these goons were going to get us anyway, and I needed food for Bilbo. I couldn’t have him eating zombie mice or whatever happened to infected animals. Could animals get infected by this…virus?

  
I decided that was a good question, so I said it aloud.

  
“Dunno,” said Alex. “But it’s probably a good idea for us all to go vegan for awhile. Maybe forever.”

  
“Great! One more fucking thing that we have to deal with. One the day that I could really use an ice cream or any fucking thing that I like, I can’t eat it. And maybe I can’t for the rest of my fucking life!” Really, this was too much. I was ready to go home and pout. Social skills? What were those things?

  
“But there are some really good vegan options for ice cream…” Tom trailed off when he saw my look of death. “Never mind.”

  
“I’m going back to the apartment. And I’m getting cat food. And I’m just…I don’t know.” I said flatly. I’d had just about enough of this whole day.

  
Peter grabbed my arm. “You can’t go back out there by yourself. That’s suicide.”

  
“Those things will be on you before you get down the stairs. They’ll be waiting on you.” Alex said reasonably.

  
“And it’s getting dark.” Tom chimed in. “He’ll be okay for tonight. We locked the door.”

  
Peter looked confused. “He? Your boyfriend? Who are you talking about?”

  
Alex rolled his eyes and sighed. “She wants to go back for her damn cat.”

  
Tom folded me into his arms, his head bowing into my shoulder. “He’ll be okay, sweetie. We’ll figure out how to get him. You’re more important.”

  
I started to sob in Tom’s arms, thinking about poor little Bilbo, all alone and scared, with monsters coming at him from all sides. Damn it, I had promised to take care of him and protect him when I had taken him in. I had to keep him as safe as possible. There was no other decision for me but to go and take care of Bilbo.

  
Yes, I’m a crazy cat lady.

  
I pulled away from Tom and grabbed my purse. “I’m going,” I said resolutely.

  
“How are you going to get back to the complex?” Alex smirked. “I drove, and I don’t think walking is a realistic option.”

  
Fuck that fucking smirk on his arrogant face. “If I have to walk, I will.”

  
“Wait a minute,” Peter interjected. “You want to go back to your house and get…your cat? Who is all alone with little to no food? Who might have already been –“

  
“Yes!” I shrilled. “Now, if none of you are going to help me, I’m going to be on my way before it gets too dark to see.” I fumbled around in my purse for the tiny flashlight that I kept for emergencies. It would have to do.

  
“Good luck.” Alex crossed his arms over his chest.

  
“You’re letting her go?” Peter said.

  
“If she wants to go out there, I’m not going to kill myself trying to go after her. Going out there right now is suicide. She knows that.”

  
“We have to know if other people are out there, Alex.” Peter said reasonably.

  
“Fine, we’ll do that. But wait until things settle down.”

  
“But what if there are other people, and we could help them?” Tom interjected.

  
“And what if we’re all that’s left?” Alex reasoned.

  
True. What if we were all that was left? And what if I was the last woman left on earth? So I would have my pick of…any of these guys? Hot as he might be, I had to say a hell no to hooking up with Alex. That flip response about if we were the last man and woman on earth, I still wouldn’t? I might actually get to put that one into practice.

  
Tom was…well, I’m sure that if the human race depended on it, he probably would. As far as I knew, and I knew him pretty well, he had about as much experience with girls as I did, which was none. Sure, if he were straight, I’d be all over him…or would I? I’d never really thought about him in that manner since, oh, 8th grade when I didn’t really understand that gay is gay is gay, and there’s no changing that.

  
And then there was Peter. He was hot, for certain. He was sort of a thicker version of Alex with brown hair and the same cool blue eyes. They were brothers though, and I suspected that the asshole gene was dominant. I guess Tom and I were going to have a baby.

  
Gulp.

  
But there were others out there, right? Seriously, we had come through this…didn’t some other people? Some, like GI Joe types with tanks and Hum-Vees and machine guns and whatnot? Yes, it might be the zombie apocalypse, but everything was going to be just fine.

  
“I’ll drive you.” I heard Peter say.

  
Huh?

  
“You’ll what?” Alex said, his head whipping towards Peter.

  
“I said that I’ll drive her. She needs to get her cat, and I can’t have her walking out there, so I’ll take her.” He smiled at me ever so slightly.

  
“Well before we do anything, we need to get this corpse out of here if you ever plan on coming back.” Tom pointed out.

  
“How about just throw her out the balcony? Come on, Petey, help me lift her.” Alex pulled rubber gloves out of his jacket and put them on. He began to grab Bethany’s ankles.

  
Peter did the same and made a move towards Bethany. They lifted her and carried her onto Peter’s balcony. “Watch the cat.” Peter said as they opened the door.

  
“What are you going to do with her?” Tom ran over to the door with me close at his heels.

  
“We’re going to throw her over the side.” Alex said.

  
I looked over the ledge at the courtyard. The cat was gone, with only a few mangled bones left to indicate that it had ever existed. Alex and Peter heaved Bethany’s remains onto the side, getting ready to throw her down there as well. The zombies that had destroyed the cat noticed us, and a chorus of moans ensued. Their arms stretched towards the balcony, reaching for…us?

  
“We should…should we say something? I just feel horrible about this whole thing…We can’t throw her down there with those…things.” Tom said.

  
“Well we can’t really keep her up here, Tom. If you wanna say something before we toss her over, do it now.” Peter said.

  
“Okay, Kira, come over here.” Tom put his arm around me. “Dear girl, we did not know you, and we wish we could have helped you. May she rest in peace, and may she be in a better place now.”

  
“Amen.” Alex and Peter said at the same time, then pushed the wad of person from the balcony.

  
I know that I shouldn’t have looked, but I had to. The body fell onto the mob, and they grabbed for it. They began tearing at its limbs, taking bites, then quickly throwing down the pieces. I thought for a moment that it would be just like the cat, but instead, the monsters seemed abhorred by the former zombie. They acted like a child that is served canned spinach, spitting out the things that he doesn’t like.

  
I could no longer hold back. The lack of eating and the whole situation got the best of me. I threw up all over Peter’s balcony.

  
Now, one might say that I should have vomited over the side, but that same person probably didn’t have a day like mine. Or maybe she did. After all, if anyone is reading this, it means that they survived and probably went through something similar. Or worse.

  
I blushed with embarrassment, but no one seemed surprised or impressed. What I really wanted was to take a nap, sleep through it and wake up with everything all better. But we had learned something. Whatever their taste, these things did not seem to be interested in dead zombies.

  
Whooptie do. I still needed to get my cat. The sun was setting, and very, very soon, it would be full dark, with no street lights to help me find my way or avoid trouble.

  
We went inside to get away from the smell. We might have felt like disposing of a body, but we’d be damned if we did that and cleaned up puke in the same hour.

  
“I have to go.” I said flatly. “Are you still willing to drive?” I looked at Peter.

  
“Um, yeah,” he stammered. “Lemme get my keys.”

  
“If you both are going, I’ll go too.” Was Tom concerned, or did he just not want to be alone with Asshole Alex?

  
“You don’t have to…” I started.

  
“No, I want to. There’s…safety in numbers and all.” Tom looked down at his Tom’s shoes. It had been hilarious when we bought them.

  
“All right, everyone have their weapons? Locked and loaded?” Alex held up his gun.

  
“You mean that you’re going?” I asked.

  
“Guess that I have to, right? If you guys are all going. I mean, I don’t want to look like a loser.”

  
“Wouldn’t want that,” I muttered.

  
Peter came back into the room with a large backpack. He answered my raised eyebrows with “I thought that we should pack some food.”

  
Good idea. Since my stomach was now officially empty, I was starving. “Do you have any…extra cat food?”

  
“Yes, all packed.” Peter smiled. “All right Meow, let’s go!” Mr. Meow then dutifully jumped into the small carrier beside the couch.

  
“Wow, I’ve never seen a cat do that.” Tom said.

  
“He also does tricks.” Peter noticed Alex’s withered look. “Which I’ll show you later.”

  
“Wait, you’re taking your cat?” I asked. “With those…things out there?”

  
“Yep, in case we can’t get back here. I’m thinking ahead.” He smiled and winked at me. All right buddy, this was not the time to flirt.

  
“Let’s go, so we can get over to the Armory faster.” Alex pulled the clip on his gun and crossed it over his chest. “Tom, help Peter with his stuff, that way he can help me with the defense. Bro, where’re you parked, man?”

  
Peter looked as though someone had kicked him in the groin. “By the courtyard.”

  
“Okay, so this won’t be easy. I’m going to take out as many of them as I can with the gun from the balcony” Alex was taking on the voice and attitude of a drill instructor, and we his little minions.

  
“The only way to get rid of one is to…shoot them in the head.” Tom supplied.

  
“Right,” I agreed. “That seems to be the only thing that puts them down for good.”

  
“Here,” Peter said, tossing Alex a high tech diving mask and putting on one himself.

  
“What’s that?” Tom asked.

  
“Night vision googles.”

  
“Why don’t we get a pair?” I had to ask.

  
“I only have two pairs, and since we’re the better shots, we need them.” Peter answered.

  
Oh.

  
I felt the minutes tick away as we waited for Cobra Commander and Destro to pick off the easy shots. In the dark. Pretty impressive when you think about it.

  
“Can we trust these guys?” Tom said in a low voice.

  
“Do we have a choice?”

  
He hung his head a little. “I guess not. But boyfriend Alex is getting on my nerves.”

  
They returned from the live-action game of Duck Hunt, and we grabbed our burdens to head out. “The coast should be pretty clear.” Peter said.

  
“I’m going to go out of here first, with Ms. Kira following me. Peter, you’re going to be following Kira. Tom, you’re bringing up the rear. So I want you to be extra careful. But we are all going into an extremely dangerous and probably fatal situation.” Man, don’t worry about sugar coating it, dude.

  
It was full dark when we went onto the stairwell. I could hear the former humans moans from the courtyard. One thing was for certain, these things weren’t stealth. And they were slow as molasses, and not at all coordinated.

  
I started to feel a little better about our prospects of getting out of here alive. Of course, I was proven completely out of my mind when we reached the bottom of the stairwell and found a crowd of goons was waiting for us.

  
Alex and Peter began unloading rounds into the heads, which seemed to attract even more of them. Each time one was blown down, two more would show.

  
“We can’t do this! Back upstairs!” Alex barked. With no better option, we quickly obeyed, Tom grabbing Mr. Meow’s crate from a zombie. We clattered back up the steps, the goons reaching after us, howling.

  
“I thought that the coast was clear!” I screamed. Totally unreasonable, considering that I hadn’t helped at all with the zombie weeding.

  
“I thought it was!” Peter defended. Alex moved in closer. What was he going to do, beat me up for yelling at his little brother? “Look, we’ll stay here…and we’ll get up first thing, and we’ll go get your cat. Promise. Okay?” Peter held up his hands in surrender.

  
I had to agree. There was no getting out of here now. Not with the full dark and the fan club downstairs. We just had to hunker down for the night. “You wouldn’t happen to have some Doritos, would you?” At times like these, a girl needs her vices.

  
I woke up next to Tom, his arms spooning me like a lover. It wasn’t the first time that we had shared a bed, but it was the first time that I had woken up and realized that the world was ending and I was still part of it. I put my face into his chest and breathed in his stink. I shrinked away quickly, completely repulsed. But what if it were up to Tom and me to repopulate the earth? What if he was going to become my…husband?

  
Who was I kidding? Tom was going to make a play for one of these guys? And who was to say that we were all that was left? I mean, clearly, the zombies couldn’t climb stairs, so that meant that most of the people of the world were just trapped upstairs, right?

  
I felt Tom stir beside me. I remembered turning in shortly after the leaving debacle, with Tom and I sleeping in the same bed because we didn’t trust the soldier boys.

  
Tom moaned loudly. “Ugh…you probably shouldn’t have slept with me last night. Now those guys are going to think that you’re into me.”

  
“No they won’t. Besides, they…I’m focused on other things.”

  
“Yeah, yeah, the cat. But it’s not bad, being in your position right now. Both of those boys were eyeing you up.”

  
“You don’t think they’ll try to ---“

  
“Naw. And if they do, we’ll leave. Simple as that.” Tom could be so calm, it was infuriating.

  
“I don’t think that it’s that simple.” I turned and began pulling on my jacket and shoes, then wagged my finger at him. “And they were most definitely not checking me out. They might be more into your type.”

  
Tom shrugged. “I wish. Maybe I can convince them. But I think that they definitely swing more your way. Girl, you’re every young American boy’s dream.”

  
I rolled my eyes. I’d been having this argument with Tom for the last 5 years or so. He knew just how many times that I’d been dumped, and he still thought that it was them and not me? Still, it was nice to have a male perspective, even if it wasn’t the most impartial.

  
If Tom were a character in a book, I would probably say “Mary Sue,” but the truth is that he’s just that nice.

  
“Get your pants on. We need to get out of here and find out what’s going on.”

  
“Is the power back on?” Tom asked, getting out of bed.

  
I glanced at the blank alarm clock. “Nope, but…maybe in other parts of the city…”

  
Tom snorted. “Right.” He checked his phone. “Still no signal. Looks like I’m never going to finish that game of Words With Friends.”

  
“Guess that we don’t have to worry about rent this month.”

  
Tom actually smiled. “And frankly, I’m going to complain to Jones Electric about this power situation. A 24-hour outage? What kinda losers they have working there?”

  
“Oh, and those 2 pounds I was trying to lose? Gone! Running from zombies! Awesome cardio!” I did a dramatic thumbs up.


End file.
